Author: Steve

Well since I decided to abandon Wordbooker due to the major changes in the Facebook API and changes in the FB newsfeed algorithms which mean that Wordbooker posts actually got poor “reach” I’ve been working on the Canalplan AC Plugin for WordPress and also working on the Boat Index part of Canalplan.

The big changes to the Canalplan Plugin are to do with integrating Backitude. Backitude is an Android App that provides lightweight GPS functionality but what interested me is that it supports custom servers. So I sat down and coded up the stuff needed to get backitude to send its current location to the Canalplan AC plugin. The plugin uses that information to update the “Where am I” widget part of the plugin and it also passes that information through to Canalplan AC.

When we took on the Boat Index from Jim Shead we worked out we could do some clever integration into Canalplan.

So if you are logged in you can :

• “like” a boat, actually you can like as many boats as you like
• Edit Photos and “tag” them with any of the boats in your liked list
• Nominate one of your “liked” boats to be “tracked” (Beta only at the moment)
• Down load a backitude configuration to allow you to send track information to Canalplan (Beta only at the moment)

So Canalplan can now track a boat either directly with backitude or indirectly through the Canalplan AC blog plugin.

Boat tracks can be viewed by people and you can also see the current location of any boat which has enabled public tracking.

If you are logged in you can also:

• Change the visibility of any tracked route you’ve created
• Delete any tracked route you’ve created
• Edit any tracked route to remove “rogue” tracking waypoints
• Change if your tracked boat is public or not. If its private then none of its trips are available. This might change in future

These second set of features are only available in the Beta version at the moment.